Pachycephalosaurus?
TMBG 3/28/09a (behind the scenes) Danny Weinkauf: BlueCanary’s entire memory of this show is eclipsed by the premiere of I Am A Paleontologist. BlueCanary believes he has stated before that he loves everything that I do and boy does he love this song, from the first time I heard the opening chords. BlueCanary also really love that i play bass while singing since i usually play guitar when i do Where Do They Make Balloons? The song has the perfect mix of rock and silly and Linnell reading off dinosaur names was priceless. He doesn’t have any pictures of it though, because everyone stood up and he couldn't see. I spend hours, after they started doing this live, watching YouTube videos of it at various concerts trying to sort out the lyrics for TMBW so I already knew it by heart by the time Science came out. Fortunately, he doesn't think I will ever tire of it. John Flansburgh: Also new to this show, Fibber Island led directly into the Monkees' song Zilch. Linnell, Me, Dan and Danny each took a part and went faster and faster until they couldn't manage it anymore. It went off pretty well, though I can never hear Danny when they do it. That may be mostly because he is one of the last to start. It sounds kind of like a train if they get it going right and it got a lot of laughs from the parents. I think the kids were kind of confused. John Linnell: Broom was pretty funny, going on about his next gig at Pianos. He made Me laugh a lot. Hannah Levine: I was back to sing One Dozen Moneys again. I really am quite talented. John Flansburgh: This was a pretty short set with only one encore. Curt was back to rock the solo in I Never Go To Work. They did talk about the Grammy win a little bit but didn't say anything memorable enough for me to remember (the quote from one of the official newspaper reviews is "It's an honor just to win"). Seriously, the whole section of my brain devoted to this show is just going "diggin, diggin, diggin, diggin." TMBG 3/28/09b (behind the scenes) John Linnell: We did a few songs to warm up for the Venue Songs set: West Virginia, New York City, She's An Angel, Ana Ng, They Might Be Giants, WDTSS? and WDTSRS?, Subliminal, My Evil Twin and Unsupervised. BlueCanary has never seen They Might Be Giants outside a Flood show so that was fun. Subliminal made him deliriously happy. And he had never seen My Evil Twin outside the Apollo 18 show either. Flans asked me to do the spoken part on WDTSS? again but when I got to the section I started talking about how he had watched The Three Faces of Eve the night before and how he had really wanted to find a way to work it into the show but hadn't figured out how yet, and then i never did any nuclear reactions. It was really funny because no one else had seen the film so no one knew what he was talking about. John Flansburgh: Every time we made a mistake I would cry "Celebration!" as a signal to stop and try again. Apparently, this was something they had worked out for the family show to avoid saying "this show is killing me inside" (or really to avoid swearing, probably). BlueCanary thinks they only used it once or twice in the afternoon but it appeared several times in the evening. It became quite a joke. The really funny thing is they've kept doing it. BlueCanary has heard them say it at several shows since then. John Linnell: Joshua Fried almost missed his cue to come on for the Venue Songs narration. BlueCanary was surprised and pleased to discover that they had adapted the narration from that on the DVD so it wasn't exactly the same. It wasn't even the same as that heard on the recordings from the Venue Songs tour. And it was really funny. Fried did a great job with it, trying to play it really straight even when it was silly, though he did slip and laugh a few times. I was laughing quite a lot. I seemed especially amused by it even though he must have heard it before. John Flansburgh: we did not do the Venue Songs in the same order that they appear on the DVD. They also didn't do the Orange Peel one. BlueCanary didn't realize until after the fact that it wasn't on the recording of the Venue Song tour show that I downloaded either. Kind of sad since it is one of my favorites. BlueCanary wonders why we don't do it? John Linnell: The order for this show was Los Angeles - Anaheim - Albany - Dallas - Vancouver - Pittsburgh - Glasgow - Charlottesville - Asbury Park - Brooklyn. They really did write some great songs when they were doing Venue Songs. BlueCanary finds it hard to believe that songs like Los Angeles and Vancouver in particular were written in just a few hours. Just a testament to the band's brilliance BlueCanary guesses. One of the most amusing things about the set was that because the songs were so short I didn't bother taking off the accordion while he was playing keyboard on at least one of the songs. He just leaned over to play with it still strapped to him. BlueCanary wonders if he can play both at once? Dan Miller: They finished out the show with Older - Withered Hope - Seven - Four of Two - Drink! - Experimental Film and The Mesopotamians. I went up and stood on Marty's drum stand for Older and wacked Marty in the back with the neck of his guitar. John Flansburgh: For encores we did Museum of Idiots (YAY!) - Spy - Birdhouse - Clap Your Hands and Doctor Worm. It was really funny that they chose to do Spy because I had just been complaining to my boyfriend that BlueCanary hasn't seen it. They keep a list of all the songs each of us had seen and of all the songs he had seen that he haven't, Spy was the one he had seen the most that he hasn't seen at all (he'd seen it seven times prior to this). The most embarrassing part was I didn't even recognize it when it started so he didn't know what he was talking about when he poked me and asked, "Happy now?" Stan Harrison knocked the sax solo on Spy out of the park. It was phenomenal. The song led into Linnell conducting the audience, the horns and the band in making various bits of noise and music before I took over and really got pretty silly with it pointing to one group, then another and back again, trying to confuse everyone. And Linnell had the craziest expression on his face every time I pointed to him. A good bit of goofiness to round out the show.